Sometimes... stuff happens

How Git Changed My Workflow and Other Miscellaneous Tidbits by Matt Polito

Hey… a video of me.  There were some technical problems but it turned out not as horrible as I thought… yeah!

Scott Pilgram Vs. The World

Movie was not even on my radar before this trailer.  It looks amazing.

Is “you’re a grown man, you can make your own decisions” always an alias for “you better make the right choice, and by right choice I mean the one that I want.”?

Empire Strikes Back… if made in 1950

After just finishing a great article from Smashing Magazine about the life and times of _why the lucky stiff, I’ve decided to share a few of my ideas on the subject.

I’ll be honest, I was never really a _why fan.  It took me a long time after discovering ruby to actually sit and read the Poignant Guide to Ruby.  Not sure what the reason was for me fighting it, but I did.  It wasn’t until after I discovered Hackety Hack that I really started to appreciate _why.  Something about him taking the time to create a program that helps kids learn really struck with me.  Must be because I enjoy teaching beginners.  What can I say, I’m a mediocre programmer but I feel that I have what it takes to get people started.  Anyway, what was I saying?  Oh yeah, _why.  So I finally sat down and read most of the Poignant Guide and was amazed at how much fun it was.  It was mostly banter between a few cartoon characters but still found the time to teach people ruby.  Plus I finally realized where all the ‘chunky bacon’ references came from.

My take on _why’s demise:

I didn’t really follow what was happening when his disappearance occured, but later read a few articles on what is believed to have happened.  Okay, I get it… lets say that his real life persona was compromised.  I would mildly understand the reaction of completely stepping away.  To me it seems a little over the top to not only step away but to remove everything.  Of course some people reside on both sides.  Some say they get it, some say it’s shitty of him to do.  Hey, as programmers, we’re all a little eccentric… right?  Maybe that is what drove him to the extreme.

So that pretty much brings me to the point of this article.  We’ll probably never know, and really is it our business anyway?  Let me ask if there was another reason for the almost complete disappearance.  We all know that for the most part an artist is not truly appreciated until they pass and I would say that _why was, in many respects, an artist.  If you ask me… I think he went to the extreme to bring us all together.  By removing all assets of the _why persona he has forced the community to come together to rebuild his estate.  What if he felt there was no where else for that persona to go and decided to give us one last great act.  That would seem like quite and artistic thing to do.  How long has it been since this happened and we’re still talking about it?  People are still investing time and effort to continue the projects he didn’t leave behind.

Maybe it’s just me wanting to believe that this story is more fantastic in nature than it actually is but this is what I think and will continue with.

Honda has used technology from everyone’s favorite robot overlord, Asimo, to take a shot at the Segway.  What do you get?  Basically the precursor to those fancy fat people chairs from Wall-E.  Good on ya, Honda.

Didn’t feel like generating docs locally.. but was looking for them.  Who woulda thunk it.  There they are!

I’d like to take a minute this morning to open up a discussion on how we (as developers, ux designers) look at the whole username/password/login interaction.

The normal trend in interaction when signing up for a new web service goes something like this:

• enter my email
• (throw in a username once in a while)
• enter my password
• enter my password again

This is just the basics… sometimes there will even be extra information to enter as well.  I want to just gloss over that part for now and just focus on logging in.

So I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.  Why?  I have no idea, just trying to make this interaction a little smoother for the end user I guess.  You got to focus on something, right?

A few thoughts i’ve seen come up lately go something like this:

When creating an account does the user need to enter a password confirmation?  In this age of the super simple password reset.  If i didn’t know my password wouldn’t I just hit up the link to reset it?  So why do we need that extra step to confirm that it was correctly typed?  Of course, this requires a valid communication tunnel to the user that ensures they can get the password reset mechanism.  This nicely leads into what we (should?) do about usernames.

The required fields for creating an account vary widely on different services.  Sometimes I’m asked for an email, sometimes a username (which could be my email), and sometimes something completely different.  Is a username necessary?  Could we just ask for an email address and be done with it?  This would help ensure that we have a valid communication path for important messages to the user such as password reset.  Also this would be enough to be used as a unique identifier until an account is created and a system wide identifier can be created.  What? You aren’t specifically setting a system unique for your user?  Why would you do that?  Using the user entered email/username as an identifier is just stupid in my opinion.  I’ve seen this situation before and it’s always messy.  Inevitably a user will not want to be known as iloveanal@whatever.com in your system anymore.  What can I say… these things happen.

Once a user is in your system, they should always be assigned a unique identifier and that way all interactions can be referenced by that unique.  How the user wants to be known in your system is irrelevant at that point.  Now from a ux perspective, the user can be known as whatever they want.  (I’m looking at you Last.fm, not being able to change your username is idiotic)

Now that we’ve gotten through that, let me lay some password reset thinking on you.  Here we go… I forgot my password again, nuff said.  You mean you don’t use 1password to remember all of these things for you?  I know, I know. Not everyone can be that cool.  So this is what I think should be done when you need to use password reset. Hey I forgot my password and there is a link right next to the login fields to help me get my password back.  Clicking this link takes the user to a simple form that asks for your EMAIL ADDRESS.  That’s it!  Please don’t ask me for my email address and username or any other combination of information that I’m not going to remember, considering I couldn’t remember my important password to begin with.

So I think most of what I’ve been pondering has been covered.  Should I throw a curveball at you now?  When signing up for a new account… do we even need to ask for a password?  I think this is one of the most interesting interactions I’ve seen lately.  Is the information that will be collected or distributed that important?  Does your user care about this information enough password protect it?  Instapaper was the first service I’ve seen implement this.  Sure you can have a password if you want but it’s not necessary.  Do I really care if someone gets into my account and reads the articles I was going to read?  Not really.  Maybe if they read and deleted them before I could get to them.  That wold be a bummer but not world ending.  Obviously this path would not be taken for a service that compiles your health records or anything else of that secure nature.  I do think for a lot of services this could be a viable option though.

After all of this, what was this discussion about?  Well I just wanted to try and open a dialog between fellow developers about how to make this user experience more streamlined for our users.  Don’t they deserve it?  

This is what I believe this would look like:

With all of this being said, please comment.  I want to hear what you all think about this interaction that we have to deal with pretty much every day.

Caleb Cornman